[ckan-dev] Installing on OSX

Mon Mar 12 16:21:50 UTC 2012

On 07/02/2012 15:44, Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> I'm could use some help installing CKAN from source on my Macbook.
> I've run into several issues so far attempting the installation. Here
> are some of the issues I've encountered:
> 
> (1) The CKAN instructions for installing from source specify that a
> number of packages need to be installed, one of which is
> "build-essential," described as "Tools for building source code (or
> up-to-date Xcode on Mac)." I have Xcode version 3.2.4 installed on my
> Macbook Pro, but the latest version of Xcode is 4.1, and I can't
> install that without first upgrading my operating system from OSX
> 10.6 to OSX 10.7 (Lion). I've been holding off on upgrading my laptop
> to Lion because once I do, my personal accounting software (Quicken)
> will stop working, and there is no available upgrade.
> 
> (2) The CKAN installation instructions require me to enter a number
> of apt-get commands, but the apt-get command is not available from
> the command-line in OSX. There are apparently three systems that
> people use for installing Unix/Linux software on Macs: MacPorts
> (formerly known as Darwin Ports), Homebrew, and Fink. Fink is
> apparently the only one of the three that installs binary packages
> like apt-get, and Fink is out of date and doesn't have a lot of
> current modules. I've been advised that between Homebrew is easier
> than MacPorts, but today after installing it and running its "brew
> outdated" command I got an error message that says, "Error: No such
> file or directory - /usr/local/Cellar."

As Tom said, try following the Lion source install instructions on the
CKAN wiki, they might work on Snow Leopard as well. If you could report
back about them, that would be helpful for us.

Regarding your out-of-date Xcode, I would just go ahead and try the CKAN
install with that version of Xcode and see if it works. I know that a
couple of CKAN developers are using Snow Leopard, so I think it will
probably work.

That error message you're getting from homebrew is odd, but I think
simply running this command might fix it:

    mkdir /usr/local/Cellar

I've tried all three and I think that Homebrew is the easiest package
manager to use on OS X.